With the newest Penguin update having been released late this May, we’ve put together a list of the best practices in the industry today to best cope with Google’s updates over the past two years. Whether you have a beef with Panda or despise the Penguin updates, using these strategies can provide your site the chance to make a recovery.

Disavow

It isn’t as dramatic as it sounds, but search engines such as Google or Bing provide a disavow links webmaster tool. This is because it isn’t always the fault of a webmaster that low-quality links are impacting their website’s ranking on search result pages. Of course do what you can to remove those links, but using the disavow links tool lets Bing and Google take such a situation into consideration when your site is assessed. However, the process will involve finding these low-quality backlinks that you never consented to linking to your site in the first place. Google will want a list of these sites

Paid Links are a No No

Prime examples of low-quality links include link schemes such as paid links, which may be the result of poor performance by an SEO agency you hired. There are quality methods to link build, but paid links is not one of them. Among Google’s multitude of indicators, PageRank will take notice of site characteristics such as unnatural low quality back linking, large amounts of link exchanges with other sites, or links unrelated to yours, and spam sites.

Quality Link Building: Guest Blogging

For sites with large readerships or that like to put out fresh content regularly, coming up with unique content isn’t always easy. Often webmasters will be open to guest submissions in exchange for a backlinks if the content is deemed good quality, depending on the webmaster’s standards. This provides you the opportunity to take advantage of another sites traffic with your own content, in the event that their readership finds your content enjoyable and follows through to your site for more. This can be down by contacting a site’s webmaster or using their guest submission page. Efficient alternatives include sites such as myblogguest, which brings together both those looking for guest content as well as those providing it.

Quality Link Building: Local Directories

Whether it’s Yelp, Google+, or even the online Yellow Pages, directories are still relevant to link building today. If you offer a product or service, filling out local listing can provide for an effective way to build quality links. Of course that is only done if you genuinely fill out the listings with as much information as possible about your business. Filling out these directories knocks out two online marketing birds with one stone. Not only do you gain quality backlinks out of the process, but it increases the chances of a potential client finding your business online when using local listings.

Duplicate Content is a Must Not

After the Panda update, there were severe repercussions for sites that had high percentages of duplicate content. If you run out of ideas for content, spinning them again with a different title and a small tweak won’t help your situation. Not only because people can easily discern between two similar pieces of content, but so can Google. Your content should be original and not published elsewhere online.

Over-Optimization

Simply put, don’t overdo it on the keywords. Just like in English class, repetition and unnatural use of words for the sake of getting it into the content will not help your cause. Panda knows this. This may not even be your fault, and in many cases can be a result of poor practice by your SEO agency. In such cases, you may want to consider dismissing the business as the results of such over-SEO is in fact a lack of results the next time someone looks your firm up.

Ricardo Casas is the CEO of Fahrenheit Marketing in Austin, Texas. Fahrenheit offers a broad range of marketing services such as its trademark FahrenTrack call tracking service to basic online PR, helping you follow up and catch every potential lead.